It's a trick question. Someone asks, "Where is the church?" "Jubiläumsplatz," you answer. "Half way up Kirchenfeldstrasse." "Wrong," they say. "The church is the Body of Christ, and wherever Christians are, there is the church." Well, yes, but...
But "a" church is a building - the place where the church comes and meets. The building is important, too. It has a special shape and layout. The arrangement, the furnishings, the proportions of the building all reflect the things that go on there. Or do they?
There is no one pattern for a church building. We can only guess at where the earliest Christians met. Certainly they were nothing like Leonardo da Vinci's depiction of the Last Supper - people didn't sit on chairs to start with! We know there was a table, where everyone gathered to share in the body and blood of the Lord by eating and drinking together (1 Cor 10:16-21). But there is a limit to the number of people who can sit around a table, and we know that services could be crowded, with people sitting on the window sills - with occasional dire results (Acts 20:9)!
The earliest churches that survive do not give us many clues as to how people worshipped. (If you want to give full rein to your imagination, go to the banks of the Rhine at Kaiseraugst and try and imagine what a baptism service would have been like at the Baptistery there seventeen hundred years ago!) And if you share in the worship of the Orthodox Church in Greece or the Coptic Church in Ethiopia, it will not only be the language and the actions which are strange, but also the surroundings.
St Ursula's is typical of a small western European church. It has a high roof, not with the aim of wasting energy and increasing our fuel bills, but to try and emphasize the thought that our prayers rise upwards to God. Other churches have towers or spires, to make the same point, and also so that the church can dominate the surrounding buildings. (Towers are useful for hanging bells in, too!)
Inside, there are two parts. One is the nave, where the congregation sit. The other is the sanctuary, where the people leading the worship often stand, or sit, or kneel, and where the altar usually stands. In some churches, the sanctuary is separated from the nave by an elaborate screen, and in larger churches there is space for a choir between the nave and the altar - this space is called the chancel.
The nave is the central part - in our case the only part - of the space for the laity. The German word Schiff points to one derivation of the word, from the Latin navis, a boat, and reminds us that the church, like Noah's Ark, is a place where God offers peace and protection (look at 1 Peter 3:20-21, or Mark 4:37-41).
The sanctuary is separated by a step. In some mediaeval churches, the sanctuary was raised even higher - reflecting the mediaeval view of society, it is often said, with the knaves, the lower classes, kept firmly down in the nave! A step has the practical advantage of making "what goes on at the front" more easily visible, but many steps make things remote - too remote.
In some churches after the Reformation, this imagery of height was transferred from the altar, in the sanctuary, to the pulpit, from which the sermon was preached. But we all have our own, diverse, gifts, which we bring to the church. These diverse gifts do not have diverse values. None has a "higher" value than another. Each of us is as valuable in God's sight as anyone else, and it is right that the architecture should not stress one gift to the exclusion of another!
Perhaps we should think more deeply about the way we arrange our church building. When we celebrate the Eucharist, why does the president stand as far away from us as possible? Why do we sit in rows facing the front, as if we were at a lecture or a stage play? What is the point of all those candles? Do we need a ceiling so high that we freeze during winter unless the fan is running?
Some of these questions have answers - which gives me a topic for a future article! But others are real questions, which it is good if we ask ourselves. For it is better to worship with understanding than just because "that's the way we've always done it."
HD